A woman complained to the Independent Press Standards Organisation, the press regulator, that Greenock Telegraph breached Clause 2 (Privacy) and Clause 11 (Victims of sexual assault) of the Editors’ Code of Practice in an article published in 2023.

The complaint was upheld, and IPSO required Greenock Telegraph to publish this adjudication to remedy the breach of the Code.

The article reported on a petition hearing where a defendant who was charged with sexually assaulting two people was granted bail. The article listed a number of sexual assaults against both of the alleged victims and gave the addresses for several, including that one occurred in a “flat” and ranges of dates when the assaults were said to have taken place. It also contained other details of the charges. The defendant was named in the article.

The complainant, one of the alleged victims, said the article was in breach of Clause 11. She said the level of detail included in the article could easily identify the alleged victims, especially due to the locations of street addresses and dates, which together allowed some readers to associate the addresses with the complainant. The complainant also noted some of the dates listed in the article were during Covid-19 where restrictions on visits to residential addresses were in place, which she said revealed the relationship between the victims and the accused. She said that immediately after the publication of the article she, and others close to her, had been contacted by seven or eight people to ask whether the article referred to her family. During the course of the few weeks it took IPSO to investigate this complaint, the number continued to rise.

The complainant said the article breached Clause 2 by revealing that she and another member of her family were victims of sexual assault, information she said they had an expectation of privacy over. She also said the article was in breach of Clause 2 because it reported on specific and intimate details of the charges. She also said it was in breach of her privacy because it reported on the family’s residential addresses; the dates in which they had lived there; and the other family member’s age. The complainant said the hearing had taken place in private, and at this stage the charges would not have been made public. She said the information could only have been accessed through an officer of the court.

IPSO did not accept the publication’s argument that it was not possible to identify the victims from the details included in the article. It considered the inclusion of the dates and locations of the assaults, as well as the nature of the charges, and other details of the circumstances of the alleged crimes, revealed the identity of the alleged victims to a circle of people known to them. IPSO stressed that Clause 11 at no point specified that identification could only be to an “average reader” with no knowledge of anyone involved in the case; it considered that this defense by the newspaper demonstrated a fundamental lack of understanding of how the Clause worked as well as the wider principle of “jigsaw identification”. The combination of the failure to adhere with the Clause as well as the demonstrable lack of understanding as to how the Clause worked meant IPSO found an egregious breach of Clause 11.

Both the Editors’ Code and the law protect the anonymity of people making allegations of sexual assault. In these circumstances, the complainant and the other alleged victim had a reasonable expectation of privacy in relation to this highly sensitive information. The inclusion of the identifying details about the complainant and the other alleged victim in the article represented an unjustified intrusion into their private lives, and a breach of Clause 2 of the Code.

IPSO also had strong concerns about the publication’s conduct during the investigation. In particular, IPSO was concerned that the publication had not recognised the seriousness of the concerns raised during the investigation.

A link to the full IPSO adjudication can be found here.